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Recruiters love LinkedIn. It's becoming their favorite way of tracking down great job candidates. But some recruiters have become such out-of-control fans -- turning into noisy, obsessive, round-the-clock presences on the professional-networking site -- that it's starting to drive other people nuts.

The perils of "recruiters gone wild" are catching the attention of leaders in the human-resources field. Glen Cathey, a vice president at the Randstad staffing firm, touched off the discussion a few days ago with a post on his Boolean Black Belt blog, entitled Do Recruiters Ruin LinkedIn?

Cathey chronicled ways that recruiters flood into LinkedIn discussion groups without much knowledge of the industry in question. A case in point: participation in LinkedIn's Java Developers Group. That group's core membership consists of 45,000 people with a background in information technology. This clustering of always-in-demand professionals has also attracted more than 10,000 members who identify themselves as working in "staffing."

If recruiters listened quietly to smart people talking about Java, who's to object? There are plenty of ways on LinkedIn to post separate job listings in places where people want to see them. Every now and then, a recruiter's comments might even add to career-related conversations.

As much as LinkedIn user groups try to provide a home for sophisticated exchanges among knowledgeable insiders, that goal can be thwarted if discussion boards are overrun by "spray and pray" job notices that aren't well targeted at all. Cathey cited one participant's frustration with an influx of "over 100 BS recruiter spam/job posts," making that user wonder if it was still worth belonging to the group.

Eager to rein in such anxieties, LinkedIn has begun testing a new feature that would automatically push job postings out of the main discussion boards and into a separate jobs category. Group administrators could turn off this feature if they wanted to, but Ian McCarthy, LinkedIn's product manager for groups, indicated that the default setting will be to have this filter on.

If testing goes well, McCarthy told Social Media Today in late July, such job-spam filters could be available for all LinkedIn groups in a matter of weeks. "Lots more to come," McCarthy added in the comments section of Social Media Today's site. His remedy takes shape even as some group participants have urged that "drive-by recruiters," who flood industry discussions with waves of poorly targeted job posts, be banned from participating in such groups.

Another hot-button issue: LinkedIn's InMail system allows anyone -- including recruiters -- to send personal emails to people outside one's immediate list of connections, while paying a fee for doing so. Some of recruiters' sloppiest InMails have become objects of scorn on the Internet, being posted and reposted along with recepients' critiques. Goofs include mashups of form-letter language with attempted personal touches, misspelled job titles, and requests to see a resume after starting out the letter by praising someone's resume.

As Cathey observes, "Getting one of these InMails might be mildly annoying, but imagine if you got a couple of these a day. What kind of perception would you have about recruiters? Would you enjoy this byproduct of being on LinkedIn?"

When I spoke with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in June, he was mindful of the fact that LinkedIn needs to make its site work well for all 175 million users -- not just for the small percentage of recruiting-industry members who are LinkedIn's best customers. As Weiner put it, part of the key to running the company is "recognizing the difference between the business model and the consumer value proposition."

Weiner -- and the rest of LinkedIn's executives -- earn their keep by figuring out how to walk that line as skillfully as possible. LinkedIn makes a lot of money by letting recruiters, salespeople and others buy premium access to the company's vast databases. But it also keeps the loyalty of its big user base by constraining even those big spenders' noise-making abilities.

Paying attention to all its users is in LinkedIn's self-interest. For the long term, the company is most likely to thrive if it keeps the site as productive, uncluttered, affordable and easy-to-use as possible.

One option is for recruiters to do more to police themselves. Conscientious recruiters could call out sloppy instances of job spam. Managers overseeing big recruiting teams could read at least a sampling of their subordinates' InMails to make sure that quality standards weren't collapsing.

Better voting systems could help , too. LinkedIn could provide a full "vote up/vote down" option to users' posts in discussion groups. (Right now, LinkedIn lets users vote for popular posts, but doesn't provide a mechanism to vote down unwanted posts.) When it comes to weeding out asinine posts, Reddit and other community sites have used such bi-directional voting to good effect.